Join us as we embark on the extreme adventure of making our first home as eco-friendly, reused and repurposed as possible. Updates on room decor, furniture, art, materials used and references to other inspiring bloggers.

7.06.2010

Choose Your Weapon

Taking a break from wiring for a bit (though there's still another installment coming), the yard got some attention yesterday. Jessie's Mom (Roxi) and stepdad (Steve) are in town for a few days to bring us one crazy gift/life commitment (Jessie will cover this shortly) as well as help with other exciting manual labor jobs. What do we need to do in the yard you say? Well...

If you had to dig 20 cylindrical holes deep into the ground, what tool would you choose? Probably the post-hole diggers, because that's what they're designed for, right? Wrong. They are designed for splinters and bloody knuckles, at least when you have dry, hard-packed soil like ours. Steve and I ended up using a combination of a shovel and pry-bars...and our hands, because we could not find our one trowel anywhere.

He brought his own awesome crowbar that was a good bit longer than my Fubar, so it had much better leverage. The Fubar worked better than expected just because the prying end was pretty sharp. The reasons either of these were even necessary were (A) rocks, (2) roots, and (d) hard, dry soil, all of which put a quick end to the effectiveness of the post-hole diggers. The shovels work fine for a while, but they make a much bigger hole than we want to set these 4x4 posts in. Naturally, the first hole we start we encounter these rocks.

Thus begins the process of taking pry bars and ramming them as deep as we can around the edges of the hole we wanted to dig, then prying to loosen up some dirt, then scooping it out with our hands. While this seems rather painstaking and time-consuming, rest assured that it is. I wish we could do it every weekend. Thankfully the places we were digging for our fence and stairs were 90% in the shade, which meant we were just really sweaty, instead of ridiculously sweaty. After a little while, It was somewhat cathartic to keep digging with a sharp metal object, plus our pace picked up and we managed to finish all the holes in just a couple hours between the two of us. Tomorrow we'll get to start setting posts and packing the holes with a little Quikrete. Steve has volunteered his services in getting this started while I'm at work, which is fantastic, so I'll get to swoop in at the end and take the credit (but not really).

Meanwhile, Jessie and her mom were working on planting several of the fruit trees she got on clearance and tilling up beds for the gardens. I'll let her discuss the plan for this and the process, I just wanted to show one picture of her running the rototiller because she looks awesome. For today, they got both beds mostly ready and we got our postholes dug.

Optimus apparently likes the piles of dirt we created as pillows. Now he's all dirty. More fence building to come!

Tom

Currently listening to "Put Your Hand Up For Detroit" by Fedde Le Grand